WARREN ELLIS is a graphic novelist, writer, public speaker and author of the NYT best-selling novel GUN MACHINE.

Witch House

Published June 6, 2010 by Warren Ellis

Did the term "chillwave" make you retch? Looking around this evening, it looks like the term Witch House might stick. A floating point between glo-fi, goth, post-punk, library music hauntology, drone, doom ambient and a spooky pouch of other things. And bad Italian horror movies, apparently.

Ghost Trance, maybe. Heh. Have a listen. I must admit, I’m liking some of this, in a troubling reminiscent-of-youth way:

I picked up the White Ring/oOoOO split 7″ as a download the other month. They’ve been ringfenced by some commentators as part of this whole thing. As have a band evidently called †‡†, who I may rename “Twats” as it turns out “†‡†” is unsearchable nonsense on the internet. Several of these bands are big on using symbols as part or all of their names, which seems to just confuse the fuck out of Google.

8 Comments

frrenchbloke

tearist sound like siouxsie and the banshees being produced by severed heads circa 1986. this is not a bad thing.
modern witch do sound like something dug up by the folk at vinyl on demand on their cold / minimal wave albums. again, not a bad thing
I rather like the oddly looped half-speed (4 track cassette played on a normal stereo?) drums on the mater suspiria vision track – very reminiscent partly of moon wiring club if they were produced by severed heads circa 1983. – you can probably tell I’m a severed heads fan.
the grill grill group really need a new keyboard to type on, or are 14 and think HaXX0r speak is cool – sounds very familiar somehow.

Looking over the last.fm pages it seems that there’s a number of these younguns using HaXX0r and ????????\†_i_??d_‡^???^†\\ type names, usually pronounced as ordinary wordz. One needs to be in the know…

That said, I’m finding the lo-fi approach refreshing. It hearkens back to cassette culture and shoegaze and gladdens this old man’s heart.

I’m also surprised and flattered to find the following used for the TEARIST video:

The prior two clips are freakin’ menacing. I love it! The latter two seem to have early 80’s gothic rock mastered and that’s a really cool. Tearist sounds like three different Sioxsie songs playing simultaneously.

[…] Once again Warren Ellis shows me the way with music and he has a bunch of examples on his site http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=9743. I found a mix tape on Sound Cloud that I thought was worth sharing. [From user7941646 – Tracks […]

[…] a post out it on the farm”. And THEN your idol and general bastard of the skies, Warren Ellis goes and posts about it before you do! with a follow-up post about it the day after. That man is seriously ruining my life from a great […]

June 9, 2010

Dave

Once again, the “kids” coming up with something “NEW” and cutting edge that “They” created. Really??? ffrrenchbloke hit it right on the head. How many have heard Skinny Puppy? Bahaus? Ogre? Charlie Martin? Type-0 Negative? Nephalim Fields? Crap,…how about Tool? Pretty much 90% of the artists on the Cleopatra label???? Consider this “New” genre a F****** rehash. And whoever coined “Shoegaze” at least got that right- as many of them don’t even know what dancing or good decent fun is…they just stand there and text each other about the awful lives they lead and the hopeless things they’d like to do to each other. They name genres like baby dolls. The wheel is round and it turns-you’ll see those tracks again later. Same wheel. Different name.